Tag Archives: Lisp

Two From Garret

Posted on 2012-04-02 by jcs

I was trawling through Ron Garret’s site (see yesterday’s post) and came upon two excellent short papers. The first, The Idiot’s Guide to Special Variables discusses the difference between lexical and special (or dynamic) variables. The second, The Idiot’s Guide … Continue reading →

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Lisp At JPL

Posted on 2012-04-01 by jcs

A long time ago, I read and enjoyed Ron Garret’s story of using Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Now, he retells the story in a Google Talk that is well worth watching. Part of the story explains how they … Continue reading →

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Clozure Common Lisp 1.8

Posted on 2012-03-31 by jcs

I took advantage of the weekend to upgrade my machines to Clozure CL 1.8. As usual, installation was a snap. Just get the distribution with SVN: svn co http://svn.clozure.com/publicsvn/openmcl/release/1.8/darwinx86/ccl for Mac OS X and then ccl64 -n ? (ccl:rebuild-ccl :full … Continue reading →

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Weitz On Macros

Posted on 2012-03-28 by jcs

Edi Weitz has a very nice set of notes on The Power of Lisp Macros. They’re from a talk he gave at freiheit.com and are aimed at the beginning Lisper. They’re amazingly easy to follow even though you aren’t hearing … Continue reading →

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About Those Insecure RSA Keys

Posted on 2012-03-22 by jcs

Last month I wrote a short post on some research that showed some RSA public keys are insecure. A couple days ago I noticed that the excellent Programming Praxis has a challenge based on that research and subsequent reporting in … Continue reading →

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Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, And Elisp Compared

Posted on 2012-03-12 by jcs

A month ago we had a lively discussion here at Irreal on the question of whether or not Elisp sucks. As with most questions of this sort, there were champions of both positions: some felt that Elisp is a distinctly … Continue reading →

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Quicklisp

Posted on 2012-03-10 by jcs

After being inspired to finally start using ELPA to handle my Emacs packages, I decided to try out Zach Beane’s Quicklisp library manager for Common Lisp. Up until now, I’ve been using the manual method to get things into ASDF, … Continue reading →

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JSON Versus S-Expressions (Again)

Posted on 2012-03-06 by jcs

I’ve written several posts concerning the relative merits of JSON vs S-expressions (1, 2, 3, 4) and concluded that while s-expressions are more powerful and flexible, JSON might be a better choice because it’s supported by virtually all programming languages. … Continue reading →

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Lisp In The Debian Distribution

Posted on 2012-02-19 by jcs

This is interesting and sort of surprising. James Bromberger over at JEB’s Blog takes a look at Debian’s forthcoming Wheezy distribution and, among many other interesting facts, reports that Lisp is the 8th most popular language for developing the packages … Continue reading →

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Not Macros; Read

Posted on 2012-02-18 by jcs

James Long has an interesting post up at his blog entitled Lisp: It’s Not About Macros, It’s About Read in which he argues that what makes Lisp so powerful is not really macros but the read function. The reason for … Continue reading →

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